Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [99]
For four years, as myth has it, Ubar was cursed with a drought that withered its crops and killed its animals. If not actual, the drought was metaphorical; the glory days of the incense trade were over. Even so, the king of the 'Ad—now the legendary King Shaddad—was undiminished in his vanity, his arrogance. Shaddad—a name meaning "the strong"—believed himself to be a god, powerful and mighty. The Ubarites agreed. In chorus they proclaimed, "Who is mightier than we?"
To this, one man dissented. He was a handsome merchant, said to be dark-skinned, with flowing hair. He warned of the fate in store for the 'Ad if they persisted in their wicked ways. The man's name was Hud, and he may well have been a Jew, for his name meant "He of the Jews."
It wouldn't have been at all unusual for a wandering Jew to visit Ubar, or even for a faction of the People of 'Ad to have subscribed to Jewish beliefs. Historically, there were several opportunities for Judaism to have penetrated Arabia. As early as the time of Solomon (950 B.C.), Jewish envoys and traders may have traveled the Incense Road. And in one tradition, following their exile to Babylon (587 and 538 B.C.), a contingent of Jews migrated to Dhofar (and Ubar?) and thence to southwestern Yemen, where they quietly survive to this day in the valley of the Wadi Habban. Later, it is certain that in the diaspora precipitated by the Roman conquest of Jerusalem (70 A.D.), numbers of Jews fled to Arabia. Over the years they flourished to the extent that in 520—the time of the legendary but perhaps real Hud—a Jewish king sat on the throne of a powerful western Arabian kingdom.3
At Ubar the stage was set for a morality play, perhaps real, definitely metaphorical. The saintly Hud versus the degenerate Shaddad. Transcendence versus materialism. God versus gods. According to the Koran and subsequent Islamic accounts, Hud was appalled by Shaddad's idolatry; this accords with Islam's tenet that the greatest of all sins is shirk, the indiscriminate worship of both lesser beings and material goods. It is uncertain, though, how strongly a real (or even metaphorical) Hud would have felt about this, even if he was Jewish. The Old Testament, though a wellspring of monotheism, directs, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," not "Thou shall have no other gods but me." In Hud's era, Judaism in Arabia wasn't all that monotheistic; it appears to have been entranced with the worship of a hierarchy of angels, with the archangel Metatron rivaling the majesty of God.
Evidence of Hud's tolerance of other gods may be found in the story of the delegation of 'Adites that set out for Mecca at his urging to seek relief from Ubar's four years of drought. Mecca then was hardly a center of monotheism; it was, in fact, a swap meet for gods. A pilgrimage often entailed carting a tribal god-block to Mecca and taking another one home in return. The city's holy precinct was choked with 360 tribal idols, complemented by a painting of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To the Arabians, various deities were sources of power and influence, and it seemed perverse to turn one's back on a potential source of help by opting for only one God.
The prophet Hud may have espoused the worship of El or Allah, a single, transcendent God, and he may have decried the betyls of the People of'Ad, but there had to be more than that to his quarrel with Shaddad. Consider an obscure but telling fragment of the Ubar legend ascribed to Kaab al-Ahbar. It tells of the palace "which Shaddad ibn 'Ad built and plastered against the wind.... When he sat atop his palace with his wives, he would order everyone who passed by, be he who he may,